Majestic Zinfandel in all its guises (including Lodi's true-blue style)

Majestic Lodi icon: Rous Vineyard Zinfandel, planted in 1909, producing a classic, flowery, pure and lush style of the varietal (bottled by Ironstone Vineyards, Macchia Wines and McCay Cellars)

This is Zinfandel Advocates & Producers’ ZinEx week in San Francisco; which means, a great excuse to talk about one of our favorite subjects: California Zinfandel in all its wonderful, terroir driven varietal guises.

First things first: Lodi – our AVA (i.e. American Viticultural Area) – grows a lush, gentle, fruit forward style of Zinfandel; an overall style very much an expression of the region’s sandy loam soils and moderate Mediterranean climate (comparable to St. Helena, Healdsburg or Paso Robles, Calif.), influenced by cool coastal air funneled through a break through the coastal mountains and the adjacent Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta...

Feb 22, 2017 at 1:30 PM Permalink

LVVR brings prestige style dry sparkling wine production to Lodi

LVVR Sparkling Cellars owner/winemaker Eric Donaldson

We don’t usually talk about traditional Champagne style sparkling wines in our lodiwine.com blog because, frankly, the Lodi wine region has never been associated with finer styles of sparkling wine. Until now.

Quietly, with zero fanfare, Lodi’s LVVR Sparkling Cellars opened its tasting room doors to the public this past July 2016; in front of a 6,000-case level production facility tucked behind a big, old wooden door, in the back of the Tuscan Winery Village – located in Lockeford, just east of the City of Lodi....

Feb 15, 2017 at 4:00 PM Permalink

A mountain winery turns Lodi grown Pinotage into its specialty

Mettler family's Lodi grown Arbor Vineyards Pinotage, bottled sa Amorosa Vineyard by Loma Prieta Winery

When Paul and Amy Kemp founded their Loma Prieta Winery in 2003, high up on a 2,600-ft.-high site in Santa Cruz Mountains, they planted what other growers and producers in the region have going: Pinot Noir (mostly), with a little Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot.

And then seven years ago the Kemps took a busman’s holiday to South Africa and discovered wines made from the Pinotage grape – a crossing of Vitis vinifera (i.e. European wine grapes) developed in 1925 by South African viticulturist Abraham Izak Perold. Perold thought he was crossing Pinot Noir with Hermitage (a common, if errant, synonym for Syrah), and so he called his new creation Pinotage. In fact, Pinotage is a crossing of Pinot Noir and Cinsaut (just think, it could have been called “Pinotaut”).

Whatever the case may be, according to Ms. Kemp, “Paul fell in love with Pinotage... He got so excited about it, he couldn’t wait to get home to make some of his own. He found two vineyards in California with Pinotage planted, and a few years later (in 2013), he grafted it over our own vineyard (total of 3.5 acres) completely to Pinotage...”

Feb 9, 2017 at 7:00 AM Permalink

Is ancient vine Carignan ready for its star turn?

Hey, Carignan (here, in Lodi's Bishofberger Vineyard, planted in 1936), what's your game now, can anybody play?

The black skinned Carignan grape makes a totally delicious red wine of vivid, deep color and effusive fruit expression; usually suggesting black cherry or related sensations, such as strawberry, cranberry, raspberry or rhubarb, and sometimes violet or rose petal-like fragrances.

Red wines made primarily from Carignan tend to be dependably well balanced with moderate tannin and better than average natural acidity; usually embedded in a full, richly textured body (typically in the vicinity of 13.5% to 15% alcohol – no higher or lower, mind you, than today’s average sized Pinot Noir, Zinfandel, Merlot or Cabernet Sauvignon)...

Feb 7, 2017 at 7:00 AM Permalink

Lovin' wine in 2017 (or, we've come a long way, baby)

Oldies but moldies: 2014 Gewürztraminer harvest in Lodi's Mokelumne Glen Vineyard

Here, at the start of 2017, it’s customary for magazines, blogs and journalists to opine on what consumers will be drinking over the next year. A quick scroll through “the Google” uncovers some of these astute prognostications, such as...

Jan 30, 2017 at 7:00 AM Permalink

Lodi earns gold and double golds in Florida "best of best" competition

Adam Mettler, Michael David Winery's Director of Winemaking, with bottle of Rapture Cabernet Sauvignon, Double Gold winner at prestigious 2017 American Fine Wine Competition in Florida

There are wine competitions, and there are wine competitions. Then there  is the American Fine Wine Competition, co-founded in 2007 by Shari Gherman with Monty and Sara Preiser.

This past September (2016) Gherman and the Preisers spent a day and a half combing through the Lodi Viticultural Area for one specific purpose: to cherry-pick absolutely the finest Lodi grown wines they could find to invite to their 10th Annual American Fine Wine Competition; which took place earlier this month over the Martin Luther King Jr. weekend (January 14-17, 2017) at the Florida International University in Miami-Dade County...

Jan 24, 2017 at 7:00 AM Permalink

Lodi hauls in Best of Class, Gold & Double Gold at San Francisco Chronicle judging

Markus and Liz Bokisch won "big" at this year's San Francisco Chronicle Competion; including two Best of Class awards, one for the 2015 Albariño being harvested in this photo

Once again, during the second week of January, the San Francisco Chronicle gathered some of the country’s top wine professionals to adjudicate the annual San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition; proudly billed as the largest judging of American wines in the world.

And they mean America: For the 2017 judging, some 7,000 entries were submitted by wineries located in 28 states across the country. Mostly from California, of course, including a modest percentage from Lodi. But make no mistake, California appellations weren’t the only Gold and Double Gold winning wine regions: states like Washington, Oregon, Texas, Arizona, New York, North Carolina and Illinois all reaped their share of hardware, relative to their number of entries. Terrific wine, it seems, is made everywhere these days...

Jan 21, 2017 at 2:00 PM Permalink

Dress your ritziest to win while enjoying Lodi's 2017 Wine & Chocolate Weekend

Can anything be as much fun, or anyone look as smashing, as, say, a Lady Mary, Edith or Rose during their glorious flapper era? Why not you?

Which is why, for Lodi’s 20th Annual Wine & Chocolate Weekend – February 11 & 12, 2017 (11 AM-4 PM) – our suggested theme, for you and our wineries, is “putting on the Ritz,” in the Roaring ‘20s spirit of free-flowing fashion. We invite you to get out, dress up to the nines and go ALL out, which will make your experience of Lodi’s lusciously fresh, fruit forward wines, matched with plenty of chocolaty delicacies (and not just sweets!) at each stop, all the more memorable!

You won’t, mind you, need to know the secret speakeasy knock as you travel between the 50-plus Lodi region wineries opening their doors to Valentine spirited wine and food lovers all during this weekend. You can bet that the wineries will be decked out – some of them with floors cleared for live music and dancing...

Jan 18, 2017 at 12:00 PM Permalink

Tasting U.C. Davis and ZAP's new heritage Zinfandel clones

Lodi Zinfandel on ancient vine (planted in 1904) in Harney Lane's Lizzy James Vineyard

Since ZAP’s (Zinfandel Advocates & Producers’) big, yearly ZinEx (Zinfandel Experience) is just around the corner – taking place in San Francisco February 23-25, 2017 – it’s as good a time as any to discuss one of the reasons why it exists.

ZAP was founded as a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization in 1991; at a time when Zinfandel as a red wine category was on the wane. During the 1980s California wineries had been dropping the varietal from their lines left and right, and a larger chunk of what existed in the fields were going into soft, fruity, pink colored White Zinfandel. If red wine drinkers weren’t looking for Cabernet Sauvignon, they were asking for (gasp) Merlot (Pinot Noir hadn't quite clicked with mainstream consumers at that time)...

Jan 16, 2017 at 3:00 AM Permalink

McCay Cellars releases first Rous Vineyard plus newly "discovered" Zinfandel

Craig Rous harvests his 2014 Rous Vineyard Zinfandel

It’s big news when a handcraft, artisanal style Zinfandel specialist produces, for the first time, a wine from Rous Vineyard, owned and farmed by Craig Rous. If there were, say, just four or five Zinfandel vineyards in the Lodi Viticultural Area that might be considered grand crus – the “best of the best” (albeit unofficially), based upon a conclusive history of excellence – Rous Vineyard would be one of them. The 10-acre Rous Vineyard was planted in 1909 on St. George rootstock; on the east side of Lodi’s Mokelumne River Viticultural Area, where piles of sandy loam are the deepest and sandiest in the appellation....

Jan 12, 2017 at 1:30 PM Permalink